The Brown government, having previously stated that it is one of very few national administrations worldwide taking the idea of carbon capture seriously, has reportedly disclosed that its seriousness will not take the form of cash.
A Prime Ministerial adviser says the government will commit "tens of millions" to a pilot carbon- …

COMMENTS

Chinny reck on!

Why are they even talking about these expensive schemes when it was revealed to all today (with the doubling of car tax revenue to achieve a decrease of <1% in carbon emissions) that uk.gov are only interested in the tax revenue when it comes to carbon?

so lets get this right?

2. will not chip in for its hoped-for new wave of nuclear power station

3. Is not going back into car/electronic industry to make things more greener ?

Is it being used to pay for yearly expenses from John Lewis maybe ?

Up until a year ago all we heard from media and politicians was Global Warming, but ever since we have had all the flooding and cold weather the wording has been changed Climate Change

So What does climate change mean ?

is it hmm i wonder season change ?

when it changes from spring to summer this is a climate change ?

should we be taxed for it ? FFS

Or is it cold in Summer ? or warm in Winter ? or flooding in Summer? Well if this is the case how does us reducing our carbon foot print actually make any of the above better - if anything it will just make it colder.

We know reducing CO2 will cause the planet to cool thus the whole intention of Global warming and introduction of all these new taxes

If it is climate change how does reducing C02 stop flooding and snow in spring ?

don't believe the Gvt

like others have said, our UK government is only interested in something if they can a.) make money, b.) control us, or even better (for them).. c.) both.

if the government were really serious about going green for our global benefit, then how do you explain the below technologies?

...these examples have been around for a very long time, but hidden from and denied to us:

http://www.rexresearch.com/adamotor/adamotor.htm

http://www.aethmogen.com/

and

http://www.ctglabs.com/SEG_1.htm

these technologies would both significantly reduce pollution and set us free of overcharging centralised (and inefficient) power providers (which gvt don't want to do), and in addition there would be absolutely no need for wind farms or nuclear power plants.

Carbon capture is...

One of the most barmy ideas in the current cosmos of barmy ideas - closely followed by Nuclear power.

If you don't generate it you don't need to capture it. So let's take the taxes they're going to collect anyway and put them into Power generation R&D (Wave, Tide, Solar thermal, Solar PE) more efficient generation methods and better usage (insulation, switching stuff OFF!)

This shower are as fixated as their predecessors on collecting and spending taxes but I'd much prefer it if they didn't squander it on preposterous, bonkers, barmy, ideas like Carbon-bloody-capture! Unless, that is they are also investigating GMOs that can live at low temperatures, high pressure and without sunlight while converting CO2 to something more useful.

Never mind the Government, believe the scientists.

The overwhelming weight of evidence collected by scientists, and published in peer reviewed papers, indicates that the earth's climate is changing, getting warmer (overall, on average), and that CO2 produced by human activity is a major contributory factor to this warming.

Don't be fooled by (a) deniers with their own agendas e.g. financed by oil companies, or (b) the fact that the UK government is trying to use tax to change people's behaviour, or (c) the comparatively small variations in the weather from one year to the next, or (d) the confusion that's due incomplete knowledge or understanding of the facts. Find out the facts.

Who are you going to believe? Climate scientists? Politicians? Oil company spokesmen? Anonymous cynics with a persecution complex?

Don't be misled by the nay-sayers. Do you really think that there is a huge international conspiracy of scientists to fool the population at large so they can get more research grants? Or that the government thinks that people will like being taxed more because they say it's to combat climate change?

Watch what happens to Arctic ice in the next few years. Watch what happens to Greenland ice, now being lost at the rate of 220 cubic kilometres each year.

There is a very large body of available evidence. Find some of it and read it.

Carbon capture ??

The easiest govt. solution is to place an emperor-size bucket next to Two-jags and capture HIS carbon output !! They can even help the crime statistics by sentencing serious criminals to months of removing the resultant capture. Those crims will be too busy barfing to go out and commit any more serious crimes !!

"peer reviewed papers"

Had me rolling around my chair that one did.

Get a mate to OK your paper, and later you will OK his....nudge, nudge, wink, wink say no more!

Next you'll be claiming that every single one of the so-called 2500 'scientists' who write the IPCC reports are ACTUALLY scientists and not researchers, government advisors, members of NGOs & pressure groups etc etc etc.

Sane idea but incompetent operators

Unlike the "carbon-neutral" houses, cars, flights and holidays + "living in a cave hugging a tree" scams and nonsense, carbon capture or sequestration is the only way to stop or reverse the climate warming. Nuclear power generation is important too but even that alone is only a mitigator, helping to slow the process down.

As the world population grows and demands more energy the output of greenhouse gases will increase, no matter what energy saving or mad austerity programs will be attempted by governments around the world. Only the mass sequestration can achieve stabilisation and even reduction of net greenhouse emissions.

But Gordon Brown and Co. will never be able to a) understand it, b) implement it and c) fund it. Any understanding they have of this issue does not go deeper than "oh, it can be used as a good excuse to tax 'em some more".

@Jamtits

>Considering that the earth is getting a fifth of the light it once used to, I say we need more CO2 in the air, before the world famine gets worse

The articles actually mention a '20% decrease in light', which means we'd be only 4/5ths as bright as we were before that occurred. I think an 80% light reduction would have more obvious (and catastrophic) effects.

Carbon capture is a ridiculous idea, which is why only 3 governments even consider it. There is absolutely no way to capture a significant percentage of our carbon output in an energy efficient or economically sound way. I find it unsurprising yet rather depressing that the UK government is keen on such a blatantly stupid concept.

@ "peer-reviewed papers"

As someone who's both reveiwed and been reviewed by peers (as in articles in journals) I prefer that to dodgy dossiers any day. As for you two who laugh at peer review, it's the best method of verifying research that we have so far. Beats the comments page on El Reg, for example.

to 'climate skeptics'

I wanted to counter a few points.

It is not us who are in government putting taxes on carbon to bail out northern rock

and fund a war for oil. If it were up to me all green taxes would help funding solutions, a large part of this must be R&D. If it was environmentalists in charge we would not have 10 new coal power plants proposed and airport expansion would not be pushed.

Brown using climate change as an excuse to tax does not mean that man made climate change is not happening or that action does not need to be taken.

Carbon capture and storage is an unproven technology. DBERR (new name for DTI) have said it will commercially available until the the 2020s and the IPCC say it will only be available in the later half of this century.

To all those who call themselves 'skeptics' please remember you should be sceptical of both sides, i consider myself fairly sceptical generally. A simple wikipedia reading would tell you the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' idea of peer reviewing is simply not true.

I am actually studying this in a module in uni. i have yet to hear a lecturer, professor of phD student in the school suggest there is any form of real academic debate on if climate change is happening or that urgent action needs to happen.

@Jamtits- I have never heard anything before about us having to increase CO2 to offset sun dimming. Nor can i find anything. But i would like to read anything you have it.

@Vladimir Plouzhnikov

Uncle Joe Stalin did a lot of mass sequestration in his day, you know !! Most of that were carbon compounds too; plus some calcium compounds and a fair dollop of iron !! I believe he put them in specially built Siberian establishments, known in Russian as Gulag !! I'm sure all that mass sequestration must have help the climate change immensely !!

@AC

@ "to 'climate skeptics'"

"i have yet to hear a lecturer, professor of phD student in the school suggest there is any form of real academic debate on if climate change is happening or that urgent action needs to happen."

Because to do so in public would be to commit professional suicide and to wave bye-bye to those lovely research grants doled out to any sort of climate study AS LONG AS the conclusion is the one the paymasters want to see.

"Brown using climate change as an excuse to tax does not mean that man made climate change is not happening or that action does not need to be taken."

No, but it shows the problem (assuming there is one) isn't half as serious as most of the green movement make it out to be. And greens standing against nuclear power (the only viable low-carbon option when it comes to mass power generation at the moment) does their position no favours either.

Can't have your cake AND eat it boys, you either want to get serious about low-carbon power generation or you don't.

And if you don't that's because you know 90% of what you bang on about is scaremongering and nothing else.

Carbon Castration

I have written about this many times in other places. Here we go one more time.

If we want to make less CO2 then we need to burn less fossil carbon. Presently there is no desire in this country to do this so we need a regime change. If we double the price of ALL fuel by taxation then this will concentrate the minds of the population.

Here is the bad part. Clearly this will increase the cost of our goods and there will need to be a mechanism of refunds for exports and carbon tax on imports. It will also be unpopular but as the tax take would be in the order of £125bn it will give plenty of scope to reduce tax elsewhere. Council tax, business tax etc, which cannot be avoided could be replaced by the fuel tax which is controllable by the consumer (by how much you use).

Here is the virtuous bit. Because carbon fuel would be more expensive renewable energy will not need sponsorship as it does now. There would be no question about cost benefit of nuclear, solar or biomass power projects. As the carbon burn goes down the taxation rate would increase creating a virtuous circle.

@SteyBray, DavCrav, AC thu 14:16

Good morning, I trust you are all well?

Why do a good many of those who believe strongly in the church of MMCC seem to feel the need to dismiss anyone who doesn't also fellate Al Gore as only possibly belonging to one of the following groups:

-Nutters

-Paid Oil company shills

-Idiots

-Trolls

Surely if the evidence was strong enough then there would be no need to have these debates?

IIRC, currently there is more sea ice than has been for decades, average temperatures are falling and I still don't have to swim to work in the morning.

When you add that to the fact that where I live has, over the past few hundred thousand years, had a [long term] climate ranging from African savanna through to being under a mile of ice you cannot then tell me that humans are the sole, or main, or even contributory factor to the impending fiery-carbon-laden doom of our planet and not expect me to ask at least *basic* questions as to why you think this is so.

Answers along the lines of "because it is and you are obviously an oil company shill" do not really help your cause.

Summary of deniers' arguments so far

Goodness, some people are determined not to see what's happening around them.

The Arctic is melting, Greenland is melting, there has been a drought in Australia for years, spring is starting earlier, the world population is growing exponentially, the price of food - wheat, rice, etc - has increased dramatically.

Climate change has not been proven to be the cause of all of these events, but they are the sorts of happenings that are predicted to take place because of climate change. It's not looking good.

Here is a summary of the arguments deployed so far to ridicule the idea of climate change, and the monikers of the posters who put them, or similar arguments, forward. Please think again people, don't be blinded by cynicism, and look for good quality information.

Just say NO to PDFs

The most efficient way to sequester carbon is to spend the money creating a very, very long report on the sequestering of carbon and then send a printed copy to everyone with the slightest interest in the subject. This will then sit unread on their bookshelves for the foreseeable future, right next to the IPPC one, the Kyoto one, the Rio one….

@Lee

Good morning to you too, Lee.

First, apologies if you feel treated like a nutter / shill / idiot / troll. Of course, these do exist but so do rational, sensible people like yourself. Oh, and Gore hasn't done a perfect job of trying to alert people to climate change - his film was too sensationalist and not completely accurate.

The evidence is strong, but you have to look for it and separate it out from the misguided or deliberately misleading stuff that exists too. That's why I posed he question "how do you decide who and what to believe on this issue?"

For my part, I have done my best over the past 10 years or so to look at the evidence put forward by people who I think are objective and can be trusted. These are mainly scientists, including David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the Government, Chris Rapley, Director of the Science Museum and formerly Director the British Antarctic Survey, and many other less well known scientists who work in various disciplines associated with climate science and research. All those I have spoken with are in no doubt that big changes are happening, now.

You rightly point out that the earth's climate has changed a great deal in the past and ask why it's different this time round. The short answer is, I understand, that the world population is much larger now than before, humans now exploit the planet's resources on a much greater scale than ever before, and release much more greenhouse gas - CO2, methane, etc - than before. The temperature is shooting up at an unprecedented rate, and it's accelerating.

So the subject was?

Every time `climate change´ comes up as a subject or part of one the supporters? of climate change and the nay sayers get into a real old ding dong, which is good discussion is always good even if there is a bit of name calling. However the subject of the article was about Brown's lot being in favour of carbon capture. Now given that Gordon Brown and most of his government don't even understand the technical consequences of winding his watch, what the hell are they doing supporting a number of technologies that are not proven to work by even the scientists who are proposing them? Deep well injection might wring out a few drops more oil for Bush and his buddies. Deep ocean trench sequestration may be an option but how do you get millions of tons of CO2 that deep in the ocean in the first place? And then you have to consider that carbon dioxide dissolved in water makes carbonic acid ( soda water) increasing the acidity of seawater makes it inimical to a lot of the life forms that currently live there. Also have you ever kicked over a freshly opened bottle of coke by accident? The consequences of a deep sea burp involving perhaps billions of tons of dissolved CO2 could at the very least be interesting. I don't think the issue in general has been thought out by HM gov they should bear in mind just to give the thing some scale that the 7 million population of London breathes out each year something in the region of 2.3 million tons of CO2 each year, the big worry there is that they might tax it. Don't capture it , don't produce it in the first place.